JaapSuter

Hello, I'm looking for a photo for a popular slider-down antenna in SoCal. It's for personal use. Please email me if you might be able to help me. Tom; I'll let you know when I'm done so you can delete the thread. Or delete it now if it's inappropriate. Thanks, Jaap Suter

You mean like hookturning after a 180 foot PCA?

I'm an inexperienced little bitch, I nearly died twice, and the only way I can avoid a third time is to quit jumping. Currenty looking for a twelve step program.

Dozens? On what BASE jumps? Your profile only mentions five previous BASE jumps. And as I have asked above; did you tune your brake settings for the brand new canopy? I'm trying not to judge. I got hit in the face with a cliff just a few weeks ago so I'm no better jumper than you are. The reason I want to know these things is because they mean the difference between freak incidents and rationally explicable and predicable events. If you had tuned your brake settings to minimize forward speed on opening, done thirty obstacle avoidance drills at the Perrine (and could show me video of your last three ones), jumped in zero winds, and had a stable exit; then the only conclusion is a freak incident. If on the other hand you skipped most of these steps and let your enthusiasm get the better of you, then we can understand the chain of events that ultimately led to this outcome. The only thing that allows me to be in this sport is a chance to avoid the mistakes that others have made. If I don't know what mistakes they are, I can't even try.

Woops, my bad...

Tssssk....

Did you tune your brake settings? How strong?

Sweet! Thanks for giving me a chance to plug... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1864714; Love you Abbie! Jaap

Will you include swimming? How will you avoid packing errors? Will you consider a mandatory pin- and three-ring check before exit? How will you avoid high cutaways or dangerous swoops?

It seems to me that either your LRM slider-down openings give you too much forward speed, or your slider-up openings must result in a deployment stall. Routing your steering lines through the slider grommets has a significant impact on how much you pull the tail down with a given brake-setting. I find it hard to believe you can succesfully use one and the same setting for both types of jumps. I've used my DBS on terminal skydives to test it out. I was definitely opening in a stall.

You use the same setting regardless of whether your lines go through the slider grommets or not?

Seconded...

Yeah, that's why I originally intended to use that middle brake setting for. And it's still what I use on our local 180 footer. But ultimately it's what I started using for slider up jumps as well, pretty much dropping my third most shallow setting.

Hello, how many people here have spend any time tuning their shallow brake settings (SBS)? I was just perusing the BASE fatality list and noticed that many fatal cliffstrikes happened on slider up jumps. While most succesful terminal jumps give you enough separation from the cliff, a properly tuned SBS could improve your chances on subterminal jumps, or potential early deployments when going unstable. When I had my DBS installed, I installed another one in between my DBS and original SBS. I originally intended to use the middle one for slider down bridge jumps on which I wanted more forward speed on opening, but I ended up using it for my slider up skydives (and two BASE jumps) and noticed significantly less forward speed on opening,compared to the original setting. Brake setting tuning seems often only referred to in the context of DBS and slider down jumps. Any experienced jumpers with thoughts on SBS tuning? Jaap Suter

Depending on what attitude you have displayed at your dropzone so far, that might say more about your dropzone and instructor than about you. I know a BASE jumper who started playing around with his risers on his first AFF jump. His instructor asked him why he did that. When he learned this jumper's main interest was BASE, it allowed for a more constructive and effective AFF and follow-up program. As long as you've established a humble, eager, patient and intelligent attitude at your dropzone, they shouldn't have a problem with your desire to get into BASE at some point. In fact, they better get used to it because it's going to make up a growing part of their business into the future. I don't skydive a whole lot these days, but I always pick the dropzone with the people who supported my desire to get into BASE and enabled me to get their with better preparation (by renting me a student rig that would fit a BASE canopy, by allowing me to skydive a BASE container with a belly-mount, by allowing me to jump with toggles-unstowed or steering-lines outside the grommets, etcetera). In the long run, honesty pays off...

You should be able to pick up a used unvented BASE canopy you can use for skydiving for relatively little money. You don't really, which is why you ask around on this forum and other people (your skydiving instructor for example). So you're doing the right thing. My first memorable encounter with BASE jumping was seeing the trailer for First BASE. I remember thinking how cool it must be, but (due to a lack of knowledge that possibly remains today) associating it with a high roll-the-dice factor. So I added it to my long list of "things I'd like to do some day, but won't make an aggressive effort towards yet." A few years later I happened to be watching Point Break (still the best, albeit not most realistic, skydiving movie in my opinion) and although I had seen it before, this time I got a sudden urge to start skydiving. The next day I was doing my static-line course. At that point, BASE was still on the "no immediate goal" list but as I gained more gear knowledge and learned that skydiving is a remarkably survivable sport, BASE slowly crept towards the top of the list and somewhere around skydive number 70 it popped from the original list onto my much shorter list of goals I'm effectively working towards. Up to that point I had been jumping large rental gear and my own first rig, a Sabre 170. I continued jumping my own gear, and combined it with 10k hop-and-pops on rented seven-cells (220s mostly) at another dropzone further away. My first time on a BASE canopy was during my FJC with Tom Aiello. I did another FJC with Apex BASE after that and then I ordered a BASE canopy which I skydived for the first time on my 150th-ish skydive. I don't know your situation so it's hard to tell. When I started skydiving I was still woefully ignorant on how parachutes worked. I distinctly remember being pissed off that the structure of my static-line course didn't first teach us how to pack a parachute before we made our first jump. I needed about 40 skydives before I found this forum and Blinc Magazine. That enabled me to absorb the necessary information to turn BASE from a roll-the-dice future goal into something I could effectively work towards. So from my point of view it was a healthy and natural thing to buy a common skydiving rig. It appears you're in a much different situation, already knowing more about BASE then I did when I started skydiving. In the end it all depends on how badly you want to BASE jump and how uninterested you think you'll be in other areas of canopy piloting. My recommendation is to get a cheap used BASE canopy. If somewhere down the road you learn that you enjoy other things, you can just buy, rent or loan a second rig then.

You can have just as much fun in the air with a BASE canopy in your skydiving rig. If you make sure you get a proper rig, you can still do all the funky headdown stuff those modern freefly kids are doing today... The only thing that'll be different is your canopy rides, but arguably those can be more fun with a BASE canopy (once you get into traditional accuracy) than with a middle-of-the-road 170 canopy. That isn't to say there aren't any fun things you can do with a 170, but it doesn't offer much sinking capacity and it sure as hell is damn fun to really sink down onto something smack in the middle of the bowl.

Hahaha, I'm being talked about online even when I'm not around. Scary! Anyway, my place just got an extra star last weekend because I bought a dinner table and what not! Raistlin and you should come over on Sunday to enjoy my lasagna. Give me a call! Hey GrumpySmurf, how's EA treating you? Cheers, Jaap

Indeed. The length of the line needed to pick me up in the end was 274 feet if I recall correctly.

Pfff, who cares? You play the guitar and listen to Dire Straits anyway!

Thanks, but I highly doubt it. I recall a snowboard BASE in Totally Board 7 near Interlaken. It may have been Dave Barlia but I could be mistaken. A slider up jump with a solid long delay (definitely required skysurfing experience) and a cutaway before opening. That may actually have been the first BASE jump I ever saw. Cheers, Jaap

Thanks for the replies guys. For the record, I'm not necessarily being hard on myself. It's not like I wake up in the morning and smack myself in the head calling myself stupid. Whatever happened and happens, don't spend too much time fretting over it. Learn your lessons and then look to the future... Like what kind of new gear should I get... I'm mostly posting my thoughts and theories in the hope I can start a discussion. I'm especially interested in other people's opinions on how important luck is in the grand scheme of things, not just in regards to my particular incident. I've never felt very agreeable with the Russian roulette philosophy on jumping. It doesn't do justice to the enormous amounts of time, money, blood, sweat, and tears that people have invested to get the sport to where it is today. It's not a science yet, but it isn't quite like rolling a dice anymore either...

Oh by the way, I should mention the generosity of at least five fellow BASE jumpers who all offered their own BASE gear up for loan. Incredible stuff guys! It'll take me a while to get my finances together to buy new gear, but I suspect this forced break from jumping will actually be a good thing.

I wasn't sure if it was a good idea to make the incident report publicly available. After seeing the reactions I'm glad I did. Even those that took the effort to lecture me through private messages and emails have done so on a basis of respect and out of concern for my well-being. Those messages are all much appreciated, and it has once again reinforced my belief that sharing knowledge and experience is a good thing. If just a single person reconsiders his desire to do a snowboard-BASE after reading my story, it's already worth it. So thanks for the feedback everybody. That said, there are two points that I would like to comment on. These have been raised independently by several people. Rather than replying individually, I want to address them here in the hope it starts a discussion. The two points are... Luck was a big, if not the only, reason you're still alive. You seem to have an extraordinarily amount of incidents, relative to the number of jumps you have done. Let's consider the number of incidents I had first. The luck factor will come up along the way. In my extremely short BASE career of only 84 jumps and 17 objects, I can recall 4 jumps that didn't work out as well as I wanted. The other 80 jumps went as planned, meaning I had an onheading opening, a predefined flight pattern, and a soft landing (optionally with a PLF). The four unplanned events were... A significant pilotchute hesitation at the Perrine. An unstable exit on my second foot launched cliff jump, followed by a tree landing. Described here. A 180 on a recent 300 foot crane jump. The cliffstrike talked about in this thread. The first and third incident need some qualification. The pilotchute hesitation was due to a defective pilotchute. While I still take full responsibility for that incident, this could and has happened to significantly more experienced jumpers jumping pilotchutes of the same faulty fabric. The 180 offheading on a recent 300 foot crane jump is arguably an incident to remember, but not something worth calling out. I had a 180, I was about 25 feet away from the building, I got it turned around in time, and I flew a landing pattern to my predefined backup landing area. Big deal for me, but no big deal for the sport. I had a nice and stable exit, there was no wind that night, and the packjob was at least as clean as all others before that, the ones that didn't give me offheadings. Anybody who is in the sport long enough is inevitably going to get a 180 at some point. I got my first one on jump 82 and managed to come out without problems. I wouldn't call it an incident of statistical significance. This leaves the other two jumps to think about. Both those incidents were undeniably complete and utter fuck ups on my part. The first one; the unstable exit on my second cliff jump was due to overconfidence in my BASE jumping skills. I fully acknowledged that and immediately went back to the Perrine the weekend after and did nothing but long delay stable exit practice for the entire weekend. My foot launched exits have since been rock solid. My tree landing on that jump was similarly moronic as I underestimated the glide power of my canopy. I have since improved my landing skills significantly as those who have seen me land in the advanced spot at our local cliff will attest to. The second one; the unstable exit on my second snowboard BASE was due to overconfidence in my snowboarding skills. We could argue whether or not I should have been up there on a snowboard in the first place, but what matters is that it was my snowboarding that fucked up my BASE jumping, not the other way around. So with this background, let's try and answer the question; do I have an above average number of incidents? I am particularly interested in answers from older BASE jumpers. I have done 17 objects in 84 jumps, 6 of which I opened myself (urban cranes). Many contemporary jumpers get up to 84 jumps and have mostly Perrine jumps. By all means this is a good and intelligent thing to do, and one may argue that I am rushing into new objects too quickly. But I'm wondering what my incident ratio is like when compared to the jumping style that the BASE roadtrips during the 90s demonstrated. Noteworthy is my weakness to share my stupidity with the world. How many BASE jumpers out there have had an incident happen to them and never shared their story? They don't have to if they don't want to, there are pros and cons to sharing. My point is that there is a lot more shit going on out there than we tell ourselves. For example, one popular cliff not to far from where I live has had at least five strikes in the past few years. All ended without injury, and none got much attention beyond some discussion in the local BASE community. I know several BASE jumpers who have had broken bones or otherwise injured themselves on BASE jumps, yet never spoke or wrote about it. Arguably I'm an exhibitionist... Heck, speaking of exhibitionism. Maybe my repeated attempts to jump bridges with toggles unstowed, intentional line-twist, and other interesting side effects, have led to an reputation of being reckless. Maybe so, but I'd say these were all jumps that involved a significant degree of risk-management. You don't see me pack intentional line-twist on a cliff jump. Now having said all that, let's try and tackle the comments on luck in the hope that I'll ultimately be able to drive this long post towards some sort of conclusion. Surviving the pilotchute hesitation incident was total luck. When the deployment sequence took longer than I expected, I curled up into a little ball, braced for impact, screamed "Oh Shit!" and managed to spill just enough air into the pilotchute to open a canopy in 5.2 seconds, rather than 5.3 seconds. Surviving the recent 180 off the crane had nothing to do with luck. If anything it was bad luck that I got a 180 in the first place, and then a sufficiently quick response to get my canopy turned away from the building followed by a flight according to a predefined backup plan. This leaves the other two incidents to ponder about. What part is luck, what part is preparation, and what part is skill? First, this diatribe is not meant to argue that it was skill and preparation that kept me alive. On the contrary, I'm well aware both incidents involved a significant number of variables I had no control over. Nonetheless, I do feel I have put myself in a position that defies the traditional lottery-winner definition of luck. Even more so, this is not about me potentially being offended by the comments on luck. I have pretty thick skin and am well aware of my own retardedness. This post is to comment on the disservice you are doing to the sport by attributing such survival stories to sheer luck alone. If somebody accidentally falls from a 500 foot cliff without a parachute, lands onto a steep bank of snow, tumbles down, gets up, and walks away; I would say that's luck in the lottery or Russian roulette sense of the word. Compare this with somebody who... Is wearing a parachute to begin with. Decides to go handheld instead of stowed, such that he can pitch at the first sign of instability Invested money into a vented canopy, knowing such a canopy would function better when bouncing against a wall. Is wearing a full face mountainbiking helmet. Is wearing full body armor. Has spend some amount of time tuning his deep brake settings to minimize forward speed on opening. Pulls hard on rear risers, trying to turn away, or at least slow down. Is fully aware of the risks involved (note that in this particular incident it wasn't the incident that surprised me, it was the post-incident emotional impact it had. The risks and the incident itself never surprised me once.) Suddenly we're looking at a vastly different idea of what luck really means. We could argue on whether or not I am putting too much trust into gear and technology to save my ass, and that I would be much better off with better exit and canopy skills. But that doesn't change the fact that at least part of the incident was heavily influenced by a decision making process that occurred before I even left the object. I accept full responsibility for being stupid enough to hit the cliff in the first place. But I am simultaneously taking full credit for hitting the cliff soft enough to remain without injuries. How many people have gotten hurt on cliffstrikes because of excessive forward speed, because their Gath helmets didn't offer much impact protection, or because their jeans and t-shirts didn't quite have the sturdiness of a body armor suit? So now we get to the point where I will actually agree on having been lucky. As my incident report already pointed out, my canopy could have collapsed or torn during my bumpy ride down the cliff. I don't think we should underestimate the structural integrity and floating power of a modern vented canopy, but that is no excuse to put blind trust in gear and technology advances. Nonetheless, we have seen and heard of a number of cliffstrikes in the past years in which the canopy held up remarkably well. Dare I say that not all cliffstrikes garantuee death? I also could have hung up in a much nastier spot, unable to find a ledge to sit on. Then again, if the wall had been smoother maybe I could have turned it around. Or maybe I could have ended up near a bigger ledge that wasn't so dangerous. So maybe there was as much bad luck involved as there was luck involved. As Jeb Corliss once said: "There are two kinds of BASE jumpers; those who have had serious accidents, and those who will have serious accidents." I never went into this sport thinking I would avoid object strike until I retired. On the contrary, I knew that one day I was going to hit an object. I did my best to prepare for the eventuality and combined with a certain dose of luck (or state of the universe if you like) I came out unharmed. Was I lucky? Certainly! Am I grateful for being able to live another day? Most definitely. Did I learn a lesson? Yeah, absolutely. Did I go into this adventure completely retarded and unaware of what could happen? I don't think so. Then again, maybe my denial is the true sign of my ignorance and stupidity... A good friend told me recently... For the record, if and when I go in, I'd prefer that you all lambasted me for inadequate preparation, than that you chalk it up to "bad luck". I'll be fighting "until my goggles fill up with blood". Please allow me responsibility for my final actions. Thanks, Jaap Suter p.s. I just noticed the Mistakes Thread that was started. This offers a nice complement to my comment about the number of incidents we never hear about. I'm curious to see how that thread will develop. Believe me, there are some messed up stories out there that the majority of the BASE community doesn't know about. As Ken Miller said; "Knowledge is useless, unless shared." p.p.s. Flame away...

Awesome, simply awesome. You're living my dream. Opening up a terminal wall must be the ultimate reward in BASE. Congratulations!